Every so often I sneak over to Trader Joe's to see if I'm missing out on anything. I say sneak because Alex is not a fan. If I take him with me we leave the store with an empty shopping cart. So I have to bide my time and make my way over there when he's not with me. To be honest I've had a lot of disappointing items from the store, I'm sure he can list every single one, but every once in a while I find something great. This time around it was the Sweet & Hot Jalapenos. I purchased them on a whim. I was looking for pickled jalapenos and the the regular ones were fully stocked while there were only a couple of jars of these left. So even though I had my reservations about sweet jalapenos I grabbed a jar and took it home. When I tasted one I was still on the fence, these peppers are definitely sweet and spicy. Somehow the flavor lingers and makes you want to reach for another. I put them out on pizza night and, to my surprise, Alex put them on a pizza with onions and mixed cheddar and pepper jack cheeses. Of course the pizza was delicious and addictive. So maybe next time he won't scoff when I walk in with a bag from Trader Joe's. Maybe.

I think I may be playing one long game of "Can we fry this?" I wondered how our no-knead Danish dough, from Maximum Flavor, would behave when deep fried. I finally made the time to try it out. I modified the dough slightly for doughnutland. I added some vanilla and increased the sugar a bit. After the dough was rolled, folded and rolled again we cut the dough into strips and created danish spirals with a hole in the center.

The dough fried up wonderfully. It was crispy on the outside and unrolled in a tender spiral. The danish with a hole is now looking to make a full time appearance at Curiosity Doughnuts. Tinkering and time will see where we take it.

We started with our yeasted doughnut. We added a base coat of our vanilla buttermilk glaze. We topped the doughnut with an abstract ring of our milk glaze and sprinkled our chocolate chip cookie crumbs over the top. It is a doughnut with a milk and cookies makeover.

I've used a sandy sugar wash for years to create a crisp, crunchy, sugary crust on cakes and pies. This week I was making rugelach and instead of using egg wash and spiced sugar to finish the cookies, I decided to make a spiced sugar wash. Mine has cane sugar, cinnamon, cardamom and water to make the sugar into a wet sandy paste. I like the texture of the finish better and I hoped that by hydrating the spices before baking I might get a more intense flavor out of them. The rugelach bake for about 30 minutes and they emerged with a beautiful crust on the outside that added a delicate crunch and spicy flavor to each tender bite of cookie.

The idea was chocolate chip cookie dough butter. We were looking to encompass the flavor of cookie dough in the form of a cookie butter. We combined roasted sandwich cookies, brown butter, powdered sugar, malt powder, vanilla paste and salt in the food processor. Unfortunately when we went to roll it into a thin sheet the almost cookie butter became sandy. Thankfully inspiration struck. We allowed the butter to remain sandy and folded miniature chocolate chips into the crumbs. The crumbs eat like decadent brown butter chocolate chip cookies. One failure led to a delicious creation and a new direction to improve the cookie dough butter.

Because sometimes you can't decide if you prefer cooked or raw onions on your burgers. I pressed these onions into the burgers just before flipping them so they cooked into the meat. They were crisp-tender, bathed in beefy juices, and they didn't slide off the burger when you bit into it.

We celebrated the day at the shop with strawberry cookie butter hearts. It's a small gesture to show our customers how much we appreciate them. Thanks for coming to see us, there and here. Happy Valentine's Day!

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